Pranabda, Thank You for More Banks

The moment I heard Mr Pranab Mukherjee talking about new banking licences in his budget speech, I went: "Yippie! Serves you right you private sector banks. There will be some more breathing down your ugly necks."

I am no bank-hater – by constitution or by birth – and my instinctive elation may have been horribly off the mark, in that more banks may not necessarily be good news for PLU but of late, I seem to be meeting too many victims of the gross callousness and negligence of the existing ones.

And no I am not talking about just private banks.

For some inexplicable reason, as a society, we have learnt to haul up doctors for negligence but are still some distance off from taking banks to book. May be because we have no faith in the redressal process, may be living with the unprofessionalism of banks is easier to cope with than, say, the loss of a limb or may be simply because we are too lazy. All we can do is indulge in armchair hopes like mine of some other-worldly/business tragedy befalling all the banks in the country.

I will explain the ill-will I bear banks in general. A friend who bought a house some time back, now figures prominently in the countrywide defaulters’ list. (By the way does such a list indeed exist? It must have grown really really long of late.) For one and half years after she started paying the EMI for her home loan, she would get a call every month from the bank saying that her ECS had been refused and she would need to pay up.

Inquiries with her own bank revealed nothing. They told her there was never any ECS request sent to her account. My perplexed friend would issue a cheque every month. Till one day, many month later, she managed to, after persistent letters, see the ECS rquests to her account.

The last digit of the account number was missing in all of them.

Another friend, who lost his father recently, went to the bank to block his late father’s account as the latter had been partner in a firm. The first helpful response he received was: "Don’t worry, just take out all the money. It’s not that we have blocked the account already." Of course they hadn’t but wasn’t that exactly the issue?

After many weeks of going to and fro and supplying all kinds of documents and passport size photographs under the sun, he was asked to get his mother sign an affidavit that his father had been planning to open another account in the bank. Which is not true.

He is still thinking if he can ask his recently widowed mother to sign a false affidavit in her husband’s name.

Yet another friend found her bank account frozen one fine morning. When she went to check, the manager told her the account had been frozen for non-payment of car loan EMI for ten months.

She had prepaid the entire loan amount ten months ahead of schedule and had a no-objection letter from the bank to prove it. The account was unfrozen immediately but the bank refused to pay up the fines for the mass of bounced cheques on the ground that they had never received them at all.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

Author

Abantika Ghosh is an incurable foodie for whom life is one long (losing) battle with the bulge. Between adding and attempting to reduce calories, she is assistant editor, metro, at The Times Of India, Delhi. The blog is just about our life and times, about being a thirtysomething living in these times when economically and socially every day we are redefining our existence, finding new meanings to old idioms and after all that find ourselves at times mouthing the same old prejudices that we abhor in the older generation. Getting old ?eh!

Abantika Ghosh is an incurable foodie for whom life is one long (losing) battle with the bulge. Between adding and attempting to reduce calories, she is ass. . .

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Author

Abantika Ghosh is an incurable foodie for whom life is one long (losing) battle with the bulge. Between adding and attempting to reduce calories, she is assistant editor, metro, at The Times Of India, Delhi. The blog is just about our life and times, about being a thirtysomething living in these times when economically and socially every day we are redefining our existence, finding new meanings to old idioms and after all that find ourselves at times mouthing the same old prejudices that we abhor in the older generation. Getting old ?eh!

Abantika Ghosh is an incurable foodie for whom life is one long (losing) battle with the bulge. Between adding and attempting to reduce calories, she is ass. . .